Protecting your email reputation is getting harder and harder, yet it is critical to successfully delivering marketing or transactional email. A large part of protecting your reputation includes honoring the requests of a seemingly infinite number of ISPs. So what is an emailer to do?

Dynamic Block Rules are a new part of Hurricane MTA Server’s Delivery Rule system. Hurricane MTA Server’s Delivery Rules enable traffic shaping to specific ISPs. The new Dynamic Block Rules are a subset of a Delivery Rule. The Dynamic Block Rule system scans ISP responses for known codes and text which indicate that the ISP wants you to pause sending them email. The Dynamic Block System then automatically pauses delivery to that ISP for the time period setup in the block rule.

Multiple Dynamic Block Rules may be specified for each Delivery Rule and they are evaluated in the order of their priority, top-down, until a match is made, in which event that rule is activated. Only one rule can ever be active at one time. Each time a Dynamic Block Rule is activated, a Delivery Alert will be posted to the Hurricane MTA Server alert system. There is also a Dynamic Block Rule option to “Only Alert” without pausing delivery.
Each rule consists of the following pieces of information:

So what are some of the reasons why an ISP would want you to stop delivering mail? This could be the result of sending too much mail per hour, receiving too many complaints about your email, trying to deliver to bad email addresses or various other reasons. The important thing is that the ISP wants you to pause sending and failure to do so can damage your reputation.

The Dynamic Block Rule system is a part of the latest release of Hurricane MTA Server. There is also a new Dynamic Block Rule log file that can be enabled via the log settings for each account. A future post will outline that log file and show you how it can be used to analyze the effectiveness of your Dynamic Block Rules and and fine tune them to obtain the highest deliverability possible.

Within the next month we will incorporate block rules into Hurricane MTA Server’s Smart Delivery Rule list. Smart Delivery Rules are a set of Delivery Rules defined and periodically updated by SocketLabs to properly shape traffic to the large ISPs.

Until then, you can try your hand at creating your own Dynamic Block Rules to get a feel for how the system works.

Please join us for a free webinar which will highlight the new features of Hurricane MTA Server released in June and how they can be used to protect your reputation and increase your email deliverability. The webinar will be offered at two dates/times:

Tuesday July 14th 4PM EDT (click here to register)
Tuesday July 21st 9AM EDT (click here to register)
Wednesday July 29th 2PM EDT click here to register)

Space is limited, so please reserve your seat now.

One of the biggest updates in the new release of Hurricane MTA Server is built in feedback loop report processing. If you are not familiar with feedback loops, it is primarily used as a mechanism for ISPs to notify senders of the recipients that are reporting their mail as spam. Since these spam complaints damage your reputation and hurt your deliverability, it is imperative that the recipients responsible for the complaints be removed from your list immediately.

This has not been an easy task in the past, but with the new features in Hurricane MTA Server it just became a whole lot easier. Hurricane MTA Server is now capable of intercepting feedback loop report messages from ISPs, which it will automatically analyze and process. The results of the analysis of each feedback loop report received are logged, passed to a new plugin API event and also included on the brand new built-in feedback loop report.

Feedback Loop Report

A new plugin API event (courtesy of the new IDynamic plugin interface) can also be handled to push the results right out to your own databases in real-time.

Hurricane MTA Server has the ability to process feedback loop reports that are in the Abuse Feedback Reporting Format (ARF) such as Aol, Yahoo, Comcast and others as well as non ARF feedback loop reports from Hotmail and MSN.

Feedback loop reports are specific to each ISP so you must sign up with each ISP separately. Normally you are required to fill out a form on each ISP’s web site proving that you are the owner of the IP addresses you wish to monitor and providing an email address to send the reports to. Once your feedback loop is setup with the ISP, you must configure Hurricane MTA Server to accept and process the messages.

The email address you choose must have its mail exchange set to the IP of your Hurricane MTA Server and Hurricane MTA Server must be configured with the same address so that it knows to accept the messages. Feedback loops are configured in Hurricane MTA Server in the new FBL tab of the account settings. Once setup correctly Hurricane MTA Server will start accepting the reports and parsing them.

Feedback loop configuration is per account.

When feedback loops are processed the results can also be put into a feedback loop log file (enabled in account log file settings) or processed by your code in real time with the new feedback loop plugin API event

See our list of feedback loop signup links.

Good luck!